July 31, 2011

"Women cannot wear tiny clothes and go out at night and expect men to worship them. They cannot then blame the police and the government... Our culture does not allow such vulgar debates. Women have to be modest. My wife is fully clothed, nobody stares at her."

“Indian men feel it is their right to stare at women. Our parents tell us to ignore it. But staring is where it all begins,” said Saanvri Kapoor, a 19-year old economics student. “How many of us know that the law says staring for more than 30 seconds is a punishable offence?”

People should be allowed to dress as they want. But seriously, does this make any sense? You dress revealingly to create attention, then you whine because you get it? Their position is they can do whatever they want, and you must do whatever they want. A perfect leftist in training.

Way back in the '90's the Philadelphia Inquirer had a front page article on "wolf-whistling", the habit of construction workers to whistle and make comments to pretty girls walking by. They didn't interview any guys, but did speak to a lot of the women who were the targets of the attention. None of them seemed appreciative, as I remember the article from so long ago.

The paper was meticulous to describe what each women was wearing when she walked by. A lot of it was really revealing and certainly not the way I want my daughter to dress in public. It struck me at the time that the dynamic really was a two-way street. The men were behaving badly. But the women were also acting in a provocative manner.

I made the mistake of commenting on the article with a co-worker and she came down on me like a load of bricks. "It's all the men's fault and women can dress however they'd like."

Well, no they can't. Respect is a two-way street and if you want to be treated with respect, you need to dress with respect for those around you.

The "slut walk" thing is another example of magical thinking. Women have lived for hundreds of years in a society created by men to be safe. They think this makes it a normal condition to walk around with skimpy outfits and men will not help themselves. If they can succeed in cutting the last testicle off the last decent man, they might earn something about human nature.

Slutwalks have rapidly moved from being a dramatic - sometimes dangerous - form of legitimate protest to an excuse for young Western women to wear provocative clothing and pretend it's something more noble than the promptings of evolutionary biology.